The first galaxies may have formed much earlier than we thought

On 23 July 1999, Space Shuttle Columbia launched its heaviest-ever payload: the Chandra X-ray Observatory, a new flagship telescope for NASA. It is the world’s most powerful X-ray telescope, capable o

Galaxies come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. They can be broadly classified as spiral, elliptical or irregular, but each of these still leaves plenty of scope for variety. Take, for instance, the s

The world’s biggest digital camera telescope has started ...

What would you say if intelligent aliens came calling?

f you’ve ever read anything about cosmology, you’ll have come across an astonishing statistic: all the matter around us, everything we see and touch, every star and gas cloud and planet, makes up just

Seeking answers to your science questions? Ask our resident expert, Peter Gallivan